Generally, dental brackets have taken on various shapes and sizes. One of the more popular configurations for dental brackets has been a pair of tie wings separated by an archwire slot. The archwire slot holds an archwire and is capable of fitting the archwire therein so that the archwire may exert a force on the tooth to control movement of that tooth.
Nonetheless, while these previous archwire slot configurations have been quite popular, there are certain perceived drawbacks which present room for improvement. First, there is the need to ligate the archwire in the archwire slot. Previous archwire slots have been quite difficult to ligate.
Second, the aim of dental brackets configurations has been to minimize bracket and archwire size. Thus, any such configuration whereby the archwire may more securely fit into the archwire slot with a smaller size is desirable. Third, with a smaller, self-ligating bracket, it is also desirable to provide a bracket wherein the tie wings contain the typical ball arms or hooks used for ligating bands. Of course, a more typical design is to ligate the band about the tie wings themselves.
Another, fourth, perceived disadvantage of existing standard archwire designs is the archwire slot modulus of elasticity, which is necessarily needed to be quite high in order to exert a force on the tooth after the archwire has been emplaced into the archwire slot. Yet, it is imperative that the archwire resist any tipping, torque or rotational forces. Naturally, while it is important to have an archwire with a high modulus of strength, it is yet again desirable to have an archwire with minimal size. In other words, there previously has been a tension between maintaining size requirements, and also, the strength requirements necessary in a high modulus archwire.